Martin Luther was a monk and studied the Bible every day. He found many things in God's Word that didn't seem to match what the Catholic Church was telling people.   He thought it was very important to preach about our relationship with God in the same way that the writers of the Bible did.  This bothered him. What led him to post his "95 Theses" on the Wittenberg church door on Halloween in 1517? A money-making scheme!

     From the beginning, many followers of Jesus thought there might be a period of time between death and going to heaven because of a few references in the Bible.  The Catholic Church took that simple idea and came up with purgatory in the 11th Century.  The Catholic Purgatory was a 'waiting room' for heaven where people who had unforgiven sins had to wait around as a kind of punishment before they were allowed into heaven. Purgatory wasn't as bad as hell, but people suffered and there was talk of a 'purifying fire' that prepared them for heaven.  The Pope needed money to do some building and remodeling at the Vatican, so he came up with a plan and named Johan Tetzel as Grand Commissioner in Germany. The Pope said that indulgences could be bought from the church that would limit the amount of time spent in purgatory, and could even be purchased to speed up the process for relatives who were already dead! Indulgences were 'tickets to heaven'!   No wonder Luther was so mad! Here is a sample of Tetzel's  sales pitch:

Listen to the voices of your dear dead relatives and friends, beseeching you and saying, “Pity us, pity us. We are in dire torment from which you can redeem us for a pittance.” Do you not wish to? Open your ears. Hear the father saying to his son, the mother to her daughter, “We bore you, nourished
 you, brought you up, left you our fortunes, and you are so cruel and hard that now you are not willing for so little to set us free. Will you let us lie here in flames? Will you delay our promised glory?” Remember that you are able to release them, for as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs. Will you not for a quarter of a florin receive these letters of indulgence through which you are able to lead a divine and immortal soul into the fatherland of paradise?

    This is a really crazy notion, isn't it?  But people in medieval Europe believed this, and scraped together what money they could to buy their dead relatives a 'ticket to heaven.'  Luther was enraged.  He knew from his study of the Bible that purgatory was something the church itself had made up.  People were going without food in order to save their families from purgatory, and he saw it as the church scaring people into giving more money than they could afford, just so the Pope could build a fancy building to make himself, not God, look more powerful and important. 

    Martin Luther insisted that God looked at people's hearts and judged them based on their faith. He found this message in the books of the Bible written by the apostle Paul - especially Romans, Ephesians and Galations.  Luther believed the church was supposed to help people learn about God's gift of salvation through Jesus so they could claim it for themselves.  The problem was that the church was putting itself between its members and God's salvation. That was completely unacceptable.

     Luther believed there should be just one Christian church (the word catholic means universal), and that the problems he had identified should be discussed and corrected within the church community.  Unfortunately, the Pope didn't like being told he was wrong (according to church doctrine, he could never be wrong!) and eventually excommunicated Luther.  Because the Catholic church would not reform itself, the movement known as the Reformation was born, and those who protested church practice became known as Protestants.